Google-owned robotics firm and “nightmare” factory Boston Dynamics has released video of its latest creation: a two-wheeled, four-legged hybrid robot named Handle. The robot can stand on four legs, like Boston Dynamics’ previous creations such as BigDog and Spot. But at the end of its back two legs are two stabilised wheels, which let it stand up vertically and roll around at speeds of up to nine miles per hour. Think “Terminator riding on a hoverboard” and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the impression Handle gives off. Boston Dynamics says the reason for the hybrid design is the...

After generations of his family spent their lives as outlaws for making the infamous Irish poitín, Pádraic Ó Griallais has finally been able to carry out the family business in the open just under a decade after the spirit was outlawed. Taking a career break from his job as a high school teacher to establish a new business based on his old family recipe, Ó Griallais is free to produce and sell the highly alcoholic spirit as he pleases without the interference of the Gardaí [Irish police], who hounded the previous poitín distillers in his family with raids to put...

Pluto isn't quite as lonely as scientists had thought. Astronomers have discovered another dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, the ring of icy objects beyond Neptune. But this newfound world, dubbed 2015 RR245, is much more distant than Pluto, orbiting the sun once every 700 Earth years, scientists said. (Pluto completes one lap around the sun every 248 Earth years.) "The icy worlds beyond Neptune trace how the giant planets formed and then moved out from the sun," discovery team member Michele Bannister, of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, said in a statement. "They let us piece together...

Raqqa, Syria Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, also known as ISIS, announced today that he would be disbanding all forces and returning all land to Syria and Iraq. The move was prompted by the ongoing Climate Conference in Paris. "This is one thing we could not have anticipated," Mr. al-Baghdadi said in prepared remarks. "When we see the world coming together like this on such a dangerous subject as Global Climate Change, we realize that our Caliphate will never survive. It's only a matter of time before Climate Change is no...

The time has come to take action against thread hijackers. Let me begin with an example of thread hijacking: Like most Freepers, I am pro-life. Abortion and and euthanasia appall me, and marketing the results even more so. I support candidates who oppose the culture of death, and cheer when it is thwarted. I also do not find it necessary to mention these facts on EVERY. FREAKING. THREAD. There is a certain type of Freeper, though, who has no such restraint. For these zealots, any thread that deviates from the pro-life cause, no matter how trivially, is a heresy that...

The cause of an early morning fire north of San Diego was an electrocuted bird falling from an active power lineA bird carrying a snake in its talons struck power lines north of San Diego, sparking a hillside fire just west of The Merge. San Diego Police arrived to the location on Dunhill Street near the intersection of Interstates 5 and 805 just before 6 a.m. Flames were burning very close to businesses including the General Atomics building, officials said. Officers called in San Diego Fire-Rescue crews who contained the fire within an hour. Fire officials initially told NBC 7...

Bart found in a pool of blood more than a week ago and pronounced deadDespite being buried, he showed up at owner's house in Tampa, FloridaRescuers think he came to underground, clawed his way out then hidTook five days for his miraculous return - and now needs surgery to survive A cat that was run down by a car and written off for dead apparently clawed its way out of the grave and made its way home to be fed.Bart, a pet found on the street in a pool of blood more than a week ago, was pronounced dead...

All over the internet recently, sciFy vs. reality and a Mars satellite for petty cash: That breaks the monopoly. Faced with the spectre of other nations publishing uncensored Mars images, NASA and JPL have started publishing some much more obvious images than they have in the past including a totally uncensored video (JPL) showing large-scale structure. A few items... JPL uncensored video showing large-scale structure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=W7-4nSye4lM Raw JPL video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka08deWohpQ Electrical device of some sort with helical coil wound around it Device is on the left, about a third of the way down on the image Gear of some sort....

Nome is used to rowdy residents, but some relatively new transplants are making a real nuisance of themselves -- although unlike the colorful characters of the early 20th century gold rush days, these visitors have four legs, not two. Musk oxen are wandering into the city on the Seward Peninsula, and despite loud noises, water hoses and even a blow-up bear coated in ursine urine, they don't want to leave.

The left loves to cry racism whenever someone disagrees with them. They love to cry racism even more when conservatives dare to attempt to speak to minorities or try to fix problems that disproportionately affect minorities. Crying racism deters conservatives from trying to work with minorities or fix problems, thus perpetuating the leftist lie that conservatives don’t care about minorities. In fact conservatives care a great deal about minorities and are troubled by the problems facing them. Our solutions are obviously different from the left’s. We’re nearly fifty years into President Johnson’s Great Society welfare program and poverty isn’t down...

<p>One of the oldest distilleries in the country is warning of what some observers are calling a “whiskey apocalypse.”</p>
<p>“Despite the increase in distillation over the past few years,” says Buffalo Trace, “bourbon demand still outpaces supply.”</p>
<p>The apocalypse is looming, explains Esquire, because whiskey has become trendy overnight.</p>

On the off chance you might encounter people who don't understand why George Soros and Monsanto might want the Ukraine.... The official title of the tsars was "Tsar of all the Russias", meaning primarily 'Great Russia' (Russia), 'White Russia' (Belorus), and 'Little Russia' (Ukraine). That is the heart of the Slavic Orthodox world and Ukraine is the breadbasket of that world. The Ukraine could feed everybody from the Volga to the Atlantic and that in fact was Hitler's plan; the idea was to build a super-gauge train to haul foodstuffs from Ukraine to Europe and, as I read it at...

America's kids have been suspended for pretending that pencils were guns, but an Ohio school may have topped that. A 10-year-old student at a Columbus elementary school was handed a three-day suspension for making a finger gun and pretending to shoot a classmate. The suspension letter more formally referred to his weapon as a "level 2 lookalike firearm," reports the Columbus Dispatch. Devonshire Alternative Elementary School's principal says students have been frequently told not to play pretend gun games, with a district rep saying kids were warned consequences would follow. Those consequences hit hard last week for fifth-grader Nathan Entingh,...

In his press conference on December 20th, President Obama urged the House of Representatives to support the Senate’s immigration bill, which passed 68-32 in late June. Among the concerns cited by Americans who oppose reform are that immigrants will take their jobs, drive down wages, increase criminal activity, burden the welfare system, and reshape the cultural dynamic of the country. These concerns are mostly ill-founded. The legitimate concerns have real solutions, and a more open immigration policy will be a net benefit for all Americans... Highlights from Article: - A 2013 study by the American Action Forum states that "immigration...

<p>Anyone who opposes the Affordable Care Act is a subhuman. It is a great law but lying republicans are trying to destroy it. I signed up with no problem on the website. Republicans want to repeal my new insurance. Obama is a hero!</p>

Mitch McConnell for Pres. 2016 and General of Counter-Terrorism for VP. I thought you would be interested in this story I found on news.msn.com: US ambassador summoned by Germany over NSA spying ( http://news.msn.com/world/us-ambassador-summoned-by-germany-over-nsa-spying#tscptme, ) Wait a second? Didn’t Snowden first go to China? Where China and their reverse-technology, was granted the rights to reproduce the Grundig SW radio? I hear people in American jails, know how to increase the band-with of small transistor radio’s. What could China do with a Grundig or cell phone, like the Samsung knock-off. Now didn’t Germany discredit our secrets, as found in the German...